NAD has long been a leading player in the audio, and now audio-video, electronics business. Although NAD once took a leap and marketed speakers in some parts of the planet, it's made its name by offering amps, preamps, receivers, CD and DVD players, and surround processors that delivered more performance than the prices and often-plain cosmetics might suggest. Unlike most of its peers, NAD has avoided the temptation to move sharply up market and produce products that only the well healed can afford.

I have no statistics to back it up, but the week before the Super Bowl must be pretty hectic in your friendly neighborhood video store. Oh, sure, the end of year holidays are big, and tax refund season brings out the mad money that Uncle Sam has been keeping safe for you all year. But it's the annual rush to watch the Big Game on a Big Screen television that starts sports fans hearts aflutter.

Shane Buettner posted a Blog late last night about Pioneer's new technology, designed for richer colors, good performance in various lighting environments, deeper blacks, improved video processing, and smooth handling of motion. At the press conference, they announced that new Pioneer plasma designs (42", 50" and 60") incorporating these improvements will appear in stores in Summer 2007. Photos were not available (the photo printed here is of the current model, and odds are it will look similar). And since no specific mention was made of the Elite line, presumably the technology will be made available in all Pioneer models.

LG was the first press event of the day, and at 8AM the assembled press corps was suitably bleary-eyed. But the big news (which had broken a few days before the show) drew a huge crowd and kept all of them awake. Oh, LG did announce 12 new 1080p displays, including 9 LCDs and 3 plasmas. But it was their Super Multi Blue player that shook up the opening of the 2007 CES.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/107poty.1.jpg" WIDTH=250 HEIGHT=279 HSPACE=4 VSPACE=4 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT><I>UAV</I>'s annual Editor's Choice Awards have now morphed into the <I>Ultimate AV Top Ten Products of the Year</I>&mdash;our top choices in ten different categories for the products that impressed us the most this past year.

<I> In this guest blog, contributor Steven Stone looks at the Algolith Flea, a $995 outboard video noise reduction box. In the blog entry following this one, I take a look at the $2995 Mosquito, Algolith's most sophisticated video noise reduction device.

Algolith's Mosquito is an outboard video noise reduction device that Algolith describes as an "analog and digital compression artifact reducer." At $3000, it may be the most expensive device of its kind offered to consumers. It may also be the most sophisticated. If you judge your audio-video components by weight, it won't make much of an impact. But weight has little to do with the performance of this sort of product.

For a relatively new brand, Olevia has made a fast start. When I attended the launch of its new assembly plant in Ontario California recently, I was impressed by the efficiency of the operation, not to mention the gutsy move to open an assembly plant in the continental U.S. rather than, say, just across the border in Mexico. This says a lot about the confidence that Olevia, and its parent company Syntax-Brillian Corporation, has about its future.

It’s hard to believe but I now live in a two Bose household. My first Bose was a car stereo that came as part of a package deal in the Mazda 3 that I bought nearly two years ago. I had to take it to get the whole shebang. It wasn’t really a bad deal. Dissing Bose may be a spectator sport among heavy-duty audiophiles, but apart from a little bass heaviness (not exactly rare in car stereos), it’s a more than respectable piece of work. It I had wanted to buy a car for the stereo, I would have gone with an Acura TL.